The present invention relates to document production systems, and more particularly relates to printing systems for retrieving and inserting content from a network into a document for subsequent printing by the printing system.
The advent of the ‘information super highway’ or Internet has rapidly increased awareness and acceptance of the Internet as a resource for acquiring content. Hence, the Internet is rapidly replacing more traditional methods for obtaining information, such as books, journals, newspapers, magazines and even television.
The Internet is typically accessed by the use of a web browser, which provides a graphical user interface on a client machine. The web browser is configured for communicating with one or more web servers. If a user wishes to obtain content from a web page at one of the web servers, the user typically initiates a series of manual steps to capture the web page and then print the web page with a suitable printer. For example, the web browser resident on the client machine can capture a web page, which is typically created using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and then converts the page into a page description language (PDL) file representative of the page. The PDL file is generally not a readily viewable file, but rather is intended to be sent to a printer that employs appropriate software and hardware for printing the PDL file. If the user desires to acquire multiple web pages, the user must individually capture each web page, and then forward each page individually to the printer. Each web page may include multiple text and graphic files that must each be processed prior to printing. This is a relatively time consuming and manually intensive task.
Furthermore, since the typical web page generally includes content that is frequently updated, the user may need to access and print the web page contemporaneously with the time of use. More specifically, if a user wishes to acquire the most recent content from a web page, the user typically cannot rely upon a web page printed at a prior date. Consequently, the user may need to access the web page multiple times in order to ensure that the most updated content is retrieved.
The web pages typically cannot be batch processed or collected when in the capture environment (e.g., when browsing). More specifically, web pages generally are only captured individually, and require the use of multiple applications and multiple file conversions to capture a single web page. This task is time consuming and requires returning multiple times to the capture environment in order to acquire multiple pages.